McGill study links breastfeeding to increased intelligence

News

The largest randomized study of breastfeeding ever conducted
reports that breastfeeding raises children’s IQs and improves their
academic performance, a McGill researcher and his team have
found.

In an article titled, Breastfeeding and Child Cognitive
Development, published in the current issue of the Archives of
General Psychiatry, Dr. Michael S. Kramer, Scientific Director of
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Institute of
Human Development, Child and Youth Health (IHDCYH), reports the
results from following the same group of 14,000 children for 6.5
years.

"Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that
prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter," said
Kramer, a Professor of Pediatrics and of Epidemiology &
Biostatistics in the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and lead
investigator in the study.

Kramer and his colleagues evaluated the children in 31
Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half the mothers were exposed to
an intervention that encouraged prolonged and exclusive
breastfeeding. The remaining half continued their usual maternity
hospital and outpatient pediatric care and follow-up. This allowed
the researchers to measure the effect of breastfeeding on the
children’s cognitive development without the results being biased
by differences in factors such as the mother’s intelligence or her
way of interacting with her baby.

The children’s cognitive ability was assessed by IQ tests
administered by the children’s pediatricians and by their teachers’
ratings of their academic performance in reading, writing,
mathematics and other subjects. Both sets of measures were
significantly higher in the group randomized to the breastfeeding
promotion intervention.

"The effect of breastfeeding on brain development and
intelligence has long been a popular and hotly debated topic,” says
Dr. Kramer. "While most studies have been based on association,
however, we can now make a causal inference between breastfeeding
and intelligence – because of the randomized design of our
study.”